Morgan Freeman may want to re-think his comments on President Obama not being the first Black president. As it turns out, the commander in chief has loads of African blood running through his veins as both he and his White mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, are descendants of a slave.
A team of genealogists from the website Ancestry.com unveiled Obama’s background, which found that he is related to the first ever documented Black slave in America—on his mother’s side. Researchers combed through early Virginia records and DNA analysis over a three-year period to find a link between Obama and a man named John Punch. The Virginia man was an indentured servant in Colonial Virginia, and punished with being a slave for life, for trying to escape in 1640. “In reviewing Ancestry.com’s conclusions, I weighed not only the actual findings but also Virginia’s laws and social attitudes when John Punch was living,” said Elizabeth Shown Mills, an expert in Southern research and past president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists. “A careful consideration of the evidence convinces me that the Y-DNA evidence of African origin is indisputable, and the surviving paper trail points solely to John Punch as the logical candidate. Genealogical research on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago can never definitively prove that one man fathered another, but this research meets the highest standards and can be offered with confidence.”
Punch’s story, which occurred several years before Virginia slavery laws were set into place, is the first documented case of a Black person being sentenced to slavery for life in the colonies.
In researching Dunham’s family history, the team learned that the Kansas native was related to a White landowner in Colonial Virginia, that happened to be a descendant of an African man. According to records, Punch had children with a White woman, who was able to pass her freedom status down to them. “Two of the most historically significant African Americans in the history of our country are amazingly directly related,” added Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway. “John Punch was more than likely the genesis of legalized slavery in America. But after centuries of suffering, the Civil War, and decades of civil rights efforts, his 11th great-grandson became the leader of the free world and the ultimate realization of the American Dream.”
The discovery of Obama’s ancestry comes just after it was discovered that his wife, Michelle, is related to a white family who owned slaves.
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Photo: ABC News
